Lab 3
by LittleGingerBiscuit
Summary: In which John Watson, after carefully piecing his life back together, starts making deductions that could tear it apart again. But will it lead to a reunion, or just disappointment? Post-Reichenbach.


**Just a little something I cooked up to deal with some post-Reichenbach emotions. I've had this idea caged in my mind palace for ages now, but I haven't written it down yet. It's probably not great, as I'm a 14 year old writing at 1 in the morning on a Saturday, but hey, at least it's something. Enjoy!**

No matter what happens, life always goes on as normal. It's the way we live our lives – nothing can stop us from carrying on the pretence we're unaffected by whatever life has to throw at us.

There are few exceptions to this rule. However, in South England, London, there was an exception that set an example to everyone in a situation of pain.

John Watson, key figure in the public eye, taught the nation that it's sometimes just impossible to carry on. As much as you'd like to, as much as you long for a day when you'll wake up and have forgotten everything, it's never going to happen. Life isn't fair like that; sometimes you have to accept you're never going to mend, and build a new life around that harsh truth.

And he managed to live by that acceptance for a substantial amount of time. By no stretch of the imagination was it a full, pleasing life, but he carried on all the same. He had his job, at the clinic, and his home in Baker Street. It didn't matter that his pay was low, or that his flat was cluttered with boxes full of a dead man's possessions. None of it mattered, because he knew he could accept it and move on readily enough.

But once a new life is built, it's crucial that it stays undisturbed. And it must never, _ever, _be disrupted by the past it's left behind. Beginning a new life means laying some ghosts to rest, and once the ghosts have rested, they should stay that way.

So that's why, when John Watson was once again haunted by the most prominent ghost his past had to offer, the delicate new life he'd built for himself started to unravel at its intricate edges.

It had started like most days, at breakfast in 221B. John had dressed in a shirt he'd fished from the washing basket, pulled on a pair of trousers, then sat down at the table with that day's newspaper. The headlines were basic – politics and finance the topic of the day. Breakfast was similarly uneventful – dry toast and weak tea being the only option since he'd neglected to go shopping that week.

Everything played out like a normal, mundane morning, until the post was pushed through the little slot in the front door. It was at that moment, when those letters and parcels and catalogues were stuffed in to 221B's letter box, that John's new life started to crumble.

Mrs Hudson was always the one to collect the mail. She shuffled upstairs like she normally did, the usually thin pile of John's letters unnaturally thick.

"Yoo-hoo!"

John twisted around in his chair to face her, teacup still in hand. His mobile phone was propped between his ear and his shoulder, and he was listening intently to someone on the other end of the line. Offering her a half-hearted smile, he motioned for her to come in to the room.

She did so, gliding silently in her furry cream slippers until she was standing on the opposite side of the table. Her small face, glowing with morning vibrancy, was an innocent beacon in the sea of London chaos.

"Right…yeah…got it, thanks." John slid his phone away from his shoulder and ended the call, then raked a hand through his hair in frustration.

Mrs Hudson made a small cooing nose, meant for soothing. "Is everything alright, dear?"

John looked up at her as if only just realising she was there. "Just work," he said. "Sorry, Mrs Hudson, I'll take those." He held his hand out for the letters, and she gave them to him with a smile that was almost sympathetic. He weighed them in his palm with a frown. "Is this all mine?" he asked. "It's heavier than normal." Slowly, he felt all his emotions drain from him. _Bills_, he thought, _it has to be_.

Mrs Hudson pulled her dressing gown closely around her and shrugged gracefully. "I had to sign for that one," she offered, reaching over the teapot and tapping a brown parcel-paper envelope.

John slid it out from under the thinner letters and set it on the table in front of him, moving his plate out of the way.

"I thought it might be work things," Mrs Hudson continued. "I thought maybe you'd ordered some books…?"

He looked up at her, with her smiling innocence and motherly concern for everything he did. "Thank you, Mrs Hudson," he said, offering her a better smile than last time. "I'll take a look at it."

The landlady nodded, satisfied, and shuffled back out of the flat in her silk nightie and woolly dressing gown.

Left alone, John ran his hands over the brown paper. It was thick, and smelt like parcel glue. He could feel the indents of a box underneath the envelope, but there were no other lumps or ridges to identify it by. Its weight was around the same as a pair of shoes, or a jacket.

But the thing that caught John's attention was the fact that, covering the paper, were dozens of stamps. Ones from places like Russia, Germany and Sweden. There was one in the corner from Mexico. A plain red wax seal had been stamped at the top to keep the package closed.

John took up a knife from the table and slit the seal down the middle, breaking away crumbled wax and tearing the paper off. Underneath, as predicted, was a cardboard box. This hadn't been stamped or marked in any way other than printed with a barcode, at the very bottom.

John frowned at the box. It was a question now of whether or not to open it. It could be dangerous. It could be rigged, or bugged, or worse. But it could just be a package. It could, like Mrs Hudson guessed, be work-related. John would feel stupid going in to the clinic with the news he couldn't open their latest parcel because he was scared it could blow him up.

So, gritting his teeth, John opened up the box and tipped the contents on to the table, where it lay amongst orange juice cartons and cereal boxes.

The first thread of John's new life worked itself loose as his breath caught in his throat, and his heart began to thud erratically under his ribcage.

Because, unwound and bold on the table, was a long blue scarf. Dark blue, and of a rich, soft material. And most importantly, it was Sherlock's.

Undoubtedly Sherlock's scarf.

A shudder ran up John's spine, and he stuffed the scarf in to his jacket pocket before downing the rest of his tea and leaving for work.

On the way out of the door, he caught Mrs Hudson with an assortment of pastel-coloured curlers in her strawberry hair.

"Oh! You made me jump," she giggled, a hand pressed over her heart.

John frowned. "Mrs Hudson, did you see who sent that package? Was it the usual chap, or did he look sort of…funny?"

Mrs Hudson seemed bewildered. "I wasn't really paying attention, dear…"

_Oh_. John nodded slowly, offering her an absent smile. "Thank you. Have a nice day, Mrs Hudson."

~Sherlock~

In a new life, a lot of crucial threads are connected to work and employment. Which is why a distraction from that can be so fatal to recovery.

There weren't many clients to concern himself with at the clinic, so John had free reign of his time to ponder the question of who sent him the package. Patients came and went, and as he treated them he thought of the deep blue scarf stuffed in his coat pocket in the break room. He didn't give any thought to the fact he was probably distributing quantities of antibiotics like sweets on Halloween; he was too absorbed in his own thoughts.

It took a ring to break him out of it. It took a ring to pick out the next thread of life.

He'd been working on a young girl at the time, of about fourteen years. She'd been complaining of migraines since she'd arrived, and once announced she was near the point of fainting.

As he was preparing a medical compress for her head, half his thoughts still centred on the scarf, the girl's phone rang out through the office.

She arched up to fish the phone out of her back pocket, and quickly scanned through what must have been a text message.

John turned around just as she was putting it away, and frowned. "What phone was that?" he asked.

The girl looked around at him. "What?"

"Your phone. What is it?"

She frowned in confusion. "An iPhone," she said. "4s."

"Where did you get it?" John put down the compress, taking a step closer to the girl's chair.

She backed away a little. "I don't know," she said. "O2?"

John took another step forward, his movements stunted like someone whose leg has fallen asleep. "Can I see it?" he asked. "Please?"

The girl stood up, moving away from him further. "I can't," she said, wide-eyed. "It's not even mine. I'm just holding it for a friend." There was a silence, in which she and John simply stood and stared at each other across the office space. "I have to go," she said eventually. "My aunt's waiting."

~Sherlock~

If the scarf hadn't been enough to pick away at his life, the phone was another sign that something wasn't right.

As John drove away from the clinic and out towards St Bart's, the only two thoughts on his mind were the scarf and the phone. Sherlock's scarf, sent to him from around the world. A phone that looked too much like Sherlock's phone to be coincidence, turning up in his office at work.

Apparently, he wasn't the only person who thought the incident was strange.

Upon seeing Molly in the forensics lab, the first thing he did was relay to her the events of the day, from the moment he received the parcel to the moment the girl left his office.

However, it seemed even Molly was only in partial agreement.

"I get it, the thing with the scarf is weird. But the phone…you must just be imagining things."

John shook his head defiantly. "No," he said. "No, I'm not. That girl – she had his phone…"

"She couldn't have, John," said Molly, trying her best to sound calming. "I…"

Just then, the door to the lab opened and a young girl stepped through. She was carrying two Styrofoam cups of steaming liquid, and sticking out of her pockets were two packets of Quavers crisps. "Sorry, they didn't have any coffee, but I got tea…" she looked up when John cleared his throat. "Oh."

Molly looked back and forth between them, biting her lip. "John, this is my niece Lottie. Lottie, this is my friend John Watson."

Lottie set the cups down. "Doctor Watson," she said. "We've met."

Because that was the girl. The girl from the surgery. The girl with the phone.

John nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, Lottie was one of my patients. Just…just this morning, actually." He rubbed his fingers together, looking down at the floor. The temperature of the room had seemed to drop dramatically.

After the long silence, Lottie said, "auntie, can I talk to you outside for a minute?"

Molly nodded, and followed her niece out in to the small office room adjacent to the lab. The door closed, and John heard the click of the lock.

He was left alone in the lab. The blinds were pulled down over the windows of the smaller room, blocking them from view. He was just taking a seat on one of the high stools, when a noise resounded through the room. "_Aaaaahhhh." _

John looked up in shock. It was a sigh, a long and pleased sigh coming from Lottie's discarded coat. A ringtone.

But a fourteen-year-old girl wouldn't have that ringtone.

Unless she had Sherlock's phone.

Checking around to see if anyone else was going to come in, John slipped to the worktop and found the phone in the inside pocket of Lottie's coat. He slid the lock bar open and opened up the new message, a bubble of hope rising in his chest.

_What do you mean, 'suspicious'? – SH _

John's heart stuttered, faltering momentarily before slowly powering back to life. SH. Sherlock Holmes. _Holding it for a friend._

Without thinking, John tapped out a reply.

_Nothing. I need to meet with you and talk about it – Lottie _

Then he closed his eyes, held the phone to his chest, and willed it to ring again.

Sure enough, in the next few minutes following the previous message, the same sound of pleasure droned out of the phone.

_St Bart's. Lab three. 5pm – SH_

John glanced up at the clock. It was ten to five. Deleting the last few messages, John slipped the phone back in to Lottie's coat and quietly left the lab.

~Sherlock~

Finding lab three wasn't difficult. Situated near the top of the building, tonight it was dark and misused.

It was impossible to quell the burning desire to see him, the desperate hope he would be there. John pushed the door to the lab open slowly, taking a step in to the inky black.

"Lottie?" A voice drifted out from the shadows.

Unable to contain himself any longer, John flipped on the light.

There, bathed in the fluorescent glow of the lab lights, was Sherlock. Minus his scarf, but still Sherlock. In his hand he held Irene Adler's BlackBerry, which explained the ringtone.

The expression on the detective's face was one of rare shock. "John."

The silence was agony.

Rage took over initial surprise, and John snapped. Striding towards Sherlock, he slammed him up against a filing cabinet and aimed an upwards kick at his stomach. It hit home hard. "YOU SELFISH BASTARD!" he screamed, continuously thrashing about in the detective's restraining grasp. "Do you have _any_ idea what you've done?" He brought his fist back and snapped it forward with a bone-cracking punch to Sherlock's mouth.

Sherlock stumbled against the cabinet and sank down to the floor, clutching his bleeding face and moaning, doubled over. "John…" he wheezed.

John backed off, flexing the fingers of his hand. His knuckles ached from where they had made contact with Sherlock's angled jaw.

"John…I can explain…"

The doctor glared at him. "And I would just LOVE to hear it," he seethed. "Honestly, why not just sit and chat after TWO BLOODY YEARS OF NOTHING?"

Sherlock sat up groggily, wiping away at his bloody mouth. "I had to die. Moriarty…he would have killed you if I didn't jump. And Mrs Hudson, and Lestrade. I had to do it."

John scowled. "Two years? You had to be dead for two years?"

Sherlock coughed out some more blood, and John grimaced. "I was tracking them," he gasped, still choking in air. "Moriarty's gunmen. Tracking and killing them."

"No message. You didn't send one message."

The detective raised his eyes to meet John's. "My scarf…"

John pulled it out of his pocket and hurled it at Sherlock. "You call that a message? More like a heart-attack in a box."

"John."

"I'm serious, Sherlock. What were you _thinking_? That you could go on hiding, using kids to run your comeback for you?"

"John, please…"

John shook his head, shooting an acidic glance at Sherlock. "Christ, that's a lot of blood." Without really thinking, he turned and went to wet a cloth at one of the sinks. He wrung it out until it was damp, then carried it back to the detective. "I assume you can clean yourself up without any help."

Sherlock smirked, the smallest smirk manageable to someone with a split lip. "You're the army doctor."

John sighed in defeat and knelt down beside him, beginning to carefully wipe away the blood on Sherlock's chin. "Sorry," he muttered. "I didn't mean for it to…bleed."

Sherlock chuckled weakly. "Of course not. Just be dented for a bit then magically heal."

"Watch it, Holmes – I'm not afraid to punch again." He said the harsh words, but his voice was light.

Sherlock leaned his head back against the fridge and sighed. "I've ruined things," he said. "I've ruined this."

"You have."

"It's going to be so hard for you to forgive me."

"It is."

"You're never going to be able to trust me again."

"I might."

Sherlock looked up, hope and fear reflected in his eyes. Without another word, he leaned forward and captured John in a tight hug, burying his face in the doctor's shoulder and winding his arms around his back.

There was only one thing that John could say.

"Welcome home."

**Mushy ending. It wasn't as drawn-out as I had planned, but I'm tired. Please please PLEASE review!**

**Amy xxx**


End file.
